The tracksuit (as nylon zip-up suits were called back then), the long platinum blond hair, and let's not forget the phallic cigar – Sir Jimmy Savile projected eccentricity as a badge of pride, as this picture shows. That cultivated appearance helped to make him famous and loved. At least, people told one another they loved him. Yet now his image lends credence to shocking allegations that paint the patron of Jim'll Fix It as a child abuser who exploited his power at the BBC to get away with cynical, life-wrecking crimes.

Or did we always suspect it? Was it always there, unspoken, the sheer weirdness of Savile's self-presentation hinting at something very wrong behind the fun of Saturday teatimes?

Now each photograph of the late legend is darkening and mutating, the great character becoming the sick monster. At which point it is surely right to point out that Savile is not here to answer the allegations, and that if true, he had many enablers. Meanwhile, the picture of a good man – who just looked rather odd – turns overnight into the mugshot of an obvious villain.

Some people suffer for their looks. Retired teacher Christopher Jefferies was portrayed in the press as an oddball, his photographs published as if they were evidence against him, in a murder case in which he was proved completely innocent. Savile's looks may by contrast have protected him. He flaunted an unusual personality like a brassy shield. His image on TV and in photographs practically invited speculation as to his sexuality and personal life – what kind of man he really was. The effect may have been to head off suspicion by meeting it head on. In Edgar Allan Poe's story The Purloined Letter a document is concealed by not being concealed – it lies on a mantelpiece in full view. Similarly, Savile put his eccentricity in full view and thereby asserted that he was a true innocent. It was only in other people's sick minds that darkness lurked. Who could go around looking so daft except someone with nothing to be ashamed of?

He was hiding in the light, inventing a bizarre parody of youth style that enabled him to portray himself as an eternal man-child. Is memory playing tricks when I claim that I was always a bit scared of his television persona? Was revulsion part of the fascination?

Yet the very appearance that is held against Savile now, that makes flesh crawl as we match his blond bombshell gold-ring pictures with the dreadful stories that can at last be told, once won him a unique status in British culture. Had the Olympics been held in Britain in 1980, he would have been a star of the opening ceremony, waving his cigar, the Best of British. The sense that he was not like other men made him a secular saint. He stood at the apex of children's television, an alien yet generous figure, a vulgar incarnation of David Bowie's Starman. Savile's outlandish image made him a sacred monster – a bit repulsive, and all the more charismatic for it.